Golden Thread Gallery

The Troubles not only shaped the political landscape in Northern Ireland in the last third of the twentieth century but also influenced local artistic practice there, leaving a mark on local life and imposing on art an ethical imperative to respond. This retrospective of Locky Morris’s work, “This Then” (whose second chapter will take place at the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny, County Donegal, Ireland, next summer), showed the Derry-based artist to have been a prolific commentator on the period, exploring the spirit of the time in diverse works. It also revealed that in the past decade Morris has created art of a more introspective nature, focusing on ordinary matters with an intimist perspective, in keeping with the lived experience of a postconflict society.

An Bhearna Bhaoil—Gap of Danger, 1988, set the tone for the first part of the exhibition, which focused on emblematic